West Side Canvas: A Slice of Life on the Upper West Side

Essay and painting by Robert Beck

More towns in the United States have pizza shops than internet service. I just made that statistic up, but it’s plausible. There are eight times as many pizza shops in the U.S. as there are public libraries. That one’s the truth.* The sleepy fishing village at the top of Maine where I used to hang has neither a restaurant nor a bar, but it has a pizza place. Their version wouldn’t be recognizable around here.

One statistic that popped up a lot while I was writing this essay was that 550,000 pizzas are made every day in New York City. Not eaten, made. I don’t know if that includes frozen pizzas or not, but given that distinction, one has to consider what constitutes a representative UWS pie.

My problem was choosing which pizza place to represent the oeuvre in my West Side Canvas portfolio. With the number of slice shops and Italian restaurants on the Upper West Side serving excellent pizza, there’s an argument for excluding national chains from the category. They might be popular, but is it a pizza shop like we know pizza shops?  Getoutahere.

If you are going to talk pizza, you start with New York slice shops. They are a specific breed, one that all the rest emulate. I walk past Freddie & Pepper’s at 74^th and Amsterdam every day. It can be found on most internet UWS pizza shop top-whatever lists. It’s down a half-flight, and you can see into the slap-and-spin area from the sidewalk, an unusual perspective. It has delicious pizza and that necessary lack of over refinement. It certainly was a finalist for my article.

I haven’t tasted all the pizza on the UWS, but this column isn’t about that. My Canvas subjects are chosen because they are an important piece of the community’s psychological underpinning. There are a number of reasons Freddie & Pepper’s is a good choice to represent the community. It’s a grab-a-slice-on-the-fly kinda place. There are remnants of COVID safe-distance separation stickers on the floor. The clock is a pizza. A black-and-white headshot of Dustin Hoffman looks down from above the coolers, surrounded by lesser celebrities. There are four small tables in the back, each with one chair. You can hear the oven door jangle open, the peel slide in and out, and the door slam back shut. Those appetite stimulants have specific receptors in the gustatory system, including those for early Dustin Hoffman, and all are essential to the prime New York pizza experience.

Freddie & Peppers has a slice shop attitude, too. Not quite Trenton or Philly attitude, but pizza-boxes-piled-on-chairs-you-would-like-to-use attitude. They have been around since 1978, with nearly a half-century to hone their personality. When I order my slice, the guy asks if I want it warm or hot. Nice.

You will find the full range of pizza eaters consuming their slices inside or out front, from the third-degree pizzafiles who can do the single-handed V with a paper plate under a drooping slice while checking texts with long fingernails, to the people who fold the slice in half and turn their head sideways (considered déclassé by some above the 7^th floor).

The painting is both a portrait of a NY slice shop and a paean to the life of a pizza, compositionally taking you through the stages of cooking and consuming the pie. From the loaves of dough up front to that lady in the back pulling on a slice. A tiny part of a larger UWS pizza story, but a good one.

*US Bureau of Labor Statistics

See more of Robert Beck’s work and visit his UWS studio at www.robertbeck.net. Let him know if you have a connection to an archetypical UWS place or event that would make a good West Side Canvas subject. Thank you!

Listen to an interview with Robert Beck on Rag Radio — Here.

Note: Before Robert Beck started West Side Canvas, his essays and paintings were featured in Weekend Column. See Robert Beck’s earlier columns here and here.

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